left. It was then he noticed the scrapyard behind the house. It was full of old rusting cars and lorries. Wilt walked on. There was bound to be a village somewhere down the road and where there was a village there was bound to be a pub. And beer. But after an hour in which he passed nothing more accommodating than another awful bungalow with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside it, he took his knapsack off and sat down on the grass verge opposite and considered his situation. The bungalow with its boarded windows and overgrown garden wasn’t a pleasing prospect. Lugging his knapsack Wilt moved a couple of hundred yards down the lane and sat down again and wished he’d bought some more sandwiches. But the evening sun shone down and the sky to the east was clear so things weren’t all that bad. In fact in many ways this was exactly what he had set out to experience. He had no idea where he was and no wish to know. Right from the start he had intended to erase the map of England he carried in his head. Not that he ever could; he had memorised it since his first geography lessons and over the years that internal map had been enlarged as much by his reading as by the places he’d visited. Hardy was Dorset or Wessex, and Bovington was Egdon Heath in _The Return of the Native_ as well as where Lawrence of Arabia had been killed on his motorcycle; _Bleak House_ was Lincolnshire; Arnold Bennett’s _Five Towns_ were the Potteries in Staffordshire; even Sir Walter Scott had contributed to Wilt’s literary cartography with _Woodstock_ and _Ivanhoe._ Graham Greene too. Wilt’s Brighton had been defined for ever by Pinkie and the woman waiting on the pier. But if he couldn’t erase that map he could at any rate do his best to ignore it by not having a clue where he was, by avoiding large towns and even by disregarding place names that might prevent him from finding the England he was looking for. It was a romantic, nostalgic England. He knew that but he was indulging his romantic streak. He wanted to look at old houses, at rivers and streams, at old trees and ancient woods. The houses could be small, mere cottages or large houses standing in parkland, once great mansions but now in all probability divided up into apartments or turned into nursing homes or schools. None of that mattered to Wilt. He just wanted to wash Oakhurst Avenue, the Tech and the meaninglessness of his own routine out of his system and see England with new eyes, eyes unsullied by the experience of so many years as a teacher.
Feeling more cheerful he got to his feet and set off again; he passed a farm and came to a T-junction where he turned left towards a bridge over a river. Beyond it there was the village he had been looking for. A village with a pub. Wilt hurried on only to discover that the pub was shut for refurbishment and that there were no cafes or B&B guest-houses in the place. There was a shop but that too was shut. Wilt trudged on and finally found what he was looking for, an old woman who told him that, while she didn’t take lodgers in the normal way, he could stay the night in her spare bedroom and just hoped he didn’t snore. And so after a supper of eggs and bacon and the down payment of ?15 he went to bed in an old brass bedstead with a lumpy mattress and slept like a log.
At 7 the old woman woke him with a cup of tea and told him where the bathroom was. Wilt drank the tea and studied the tintypes on the wall, one of General Buller in the Boer War with troops crossing the river. The bathroom looked as if it had been around during the Boer War too but he had a shave and a wash and then another apparently inevitable helping of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and thanked the old woman and set off down the road.
‘You’ll have to get to Raughton before you find a hostel,’ the old woman, Mrs Bishop, told him. ‘It’s five miles down thataway.’
Wilt thanked her and went down thataway until he came to a path that led uphill into some woods and turned off along it. He tried to forget the name Raughton, perhaps it was Rorton, and whatever it was he no longer cared. He was in the English countryside, old England, the England he had come to discover for himself. For half a mile he climbed up
